Next time you “like” something on Facebook, know that you are participating in a new market research experiment.
According to Facebook Head of Measurement Solutions Daniel Slotwiner, the social networking giant has transformed how advertisers reach their audiences. Slotwiner spoke at the Annenberg School for Communication for a group of roughly 50 last Friday as part of the school’s noon time colloquium sessions.
A former senior quantitative insights manager at Google, Slotwiner began by discussing how the internet has changed data collection. “Companies started doing online what they used to do on paper,” he said, adding that the basic content of research surveys did not change despite the new technology for collecting information. Because old surveys were simply replicated online, the late 1990s saw no innovation in the way companies conducted market research, Slotwiner said.
Fast forward to 2011, and replicating surveys is “not an option” for Facebook. Discussing how the company taps the marketing potential of its 750 million worldwide users, Slotwiner said the social networking site offers “a chance to reconsider how we collect data.”
Unlike research survey participants who actively answer questions about their preferences, Facebook users view ads on the margins of the website while they connect with friends and family. And unlike television viewers, Facebook users provide information such as age, gender, location and educational attainment — all of which enable Facebook to provide advertising solutions that specifically target a desired audience.
Slotwiner added that users also provide information through the “like” button, which enables the company to track the popularity of people and products on behalf of their clients.
To provide optimized solutions for advertisers, Facebook tries to understand how different kinds of users respond to advertising, and then adjusts for variations in user time and demographics. “Usually we find that what’s good for users is good for advertisers,” Slotwiner said of the relation between user experience and advertising.
Despite the company’s efforts to advance its advertising capabilities, Slotwiner stressed that “what we care about at Facebook is users.”
Reflecting on the event, Annenberg Dean Michael Delli Carpini said, “It’s very difficult to understand the methods to study how new media influences people’s opinion and behavior.”
Third-year Annenberg Ph.D. candidate Katherine Wong added that “it was very interesting to get an industry perspective because often we study this from an academic standpoint.”
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